


Still Forsaken

by delgaserasca



Category: Luther (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-22
Updated: 2012-10-22
Packaged: 2017-11-16 20:34:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/543562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/delgaserasca/pseuds/delgaserasca
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark and Jenny face some home truths.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still Forsaken

The evening calm is broken by the sound of something falling on the skylight. Mark startles, then goes back to his book, finger on the corner of the page, ready to turn. The second knock causes his finger to slip. "—Shit!" The cut is fine, invisible until it starts to bleed, and it stings.

There's another rattle against the glass, and he looks up in time to see a stone bounce off the pane, and then another, and then two more.

Once is a bird, or a skipping breeze, Mark knows. The house is like the body of an old man, creaking and groaning at every slight shift. Noises are not uncommon. But a rain of stones — another three, now, and a shout in the distance. Someone is outside. Someone with a brilliant arm.

Pressing on his paper cut to feel it swell, he inches towards the front of the house. He should call John, but for all he knows it's just some kids fucking around.

When he gets to the window, it's not who he expected. Alice, he'd considered, somewhere in the back of his mind, or maybe Ian Reed, back from the dead. Stranger things have happened. His love was killed. It could be anyone or anything.

"Well, let me in then. I'm freezing my tits off out here."

Jenny Jones.

 

 

 

 

By the time he makes it down the stairs he realises the key is in the kitchen and has to go back. Then, heading back down he stops, turns, makes to go for the phone. Stops again, changes his mind, runs back downstairs.

She's up against an empty car, same face, different dress, puffing on a cigarette for show. "You took your time," she says, taking another drag and blowing smoke in his direction. "Get lost coming down the stairs?"

"How did you get here?" He asks, meaning to say something completely different.

She shrugs. "Walked."

"No, don't—" he shakes his head. “How did you know how to find me?”

“I’m not stupid,” she says, scraping the her toe across the road. Mark waits for more, but none is forthcoming. He relaxes, one hand still against the doorjamb. She looks cold and very small, her face still streaked in makeup and, possibly, tears. She doesn’t seem quite real.

Mark wonders what it is about John that attracts these girls, half-mad and half-made. Jenny, a marionette; Alice, a manipulator in every sense of the word. And Zoe, dear, lovely Zoe, who didn't fit the pattern, but remained flinchingly loyal to her husband, even amidst the storm.

He scrubs his face wearily. "What are you doing here, Jenny?"

"I need somewhere to stay," she mutters, suddenly unwilling to look him in the eye.

"Oh, no. No," Mark says, "not here. You need to go home."

"I can't go home!" she retorts. "Mum set John up, do you get it? Those blokes, they'll kill me. Just cut me up like sushi and hide my body in coffee tins." Her desperation looks fierce in the lamplight, not bruised as he'd assumed when John first brought her to his door, but done up in war paint. "There is nowhere else."

"Jenny," he says more softly, his stern resolve slipping, "you can't stay here."

His face must give him away because she stubs out the last of the cigarette and steps forward into the street. "Just for tonight, please. I can sleep in that ugly chair of yours again, and then, in the morning, I'll fuck off, and you can go back to hiding in peace and quiet, or talking to your books, or whatever it is that you do up there all day." Her gaze is piercing. "Please. I've got nothing and no-one. Just one night. I won't be a bother. I won't."

Nothing and nobody; the words resonate in his ribcage. He capitulates with a sigh. "All right—"

Jenny gives a shriek of happiness and throws her hands around his neck. "Thank you, thank you, thank you—"

"—but just for tonight. And tomorrow you have to leave."

"I will, I will," she assures him. "Oh, thank you!"

 

 

 

 

"Would you like some tea?" Mark asks on the way back up the stairs.

Jenny wrinkles her nose. "Got anything stronger?"

God Almighty.

 

 

 

 

In the flat he sets about making toast for Jenny, and tea for himself. In the front room she idly browses his bookcase, head tilted to read the titles. Now that she's not cuffed to one of his chairs she's free to get better acquainted with her surroundings. The dust from the top shelf makes her sneeze, and goodness, has he really been here long enough for his things to gather dust? Sometimes he forgets. Time isn't the same anymore. He counts days as intervals between meeting John, and day differs night only by waking and sleeping.

He sets the plate on the footstool, the clatter catching her attention. "Did you want to wash up first?" The thought comes to him belatedly as she sits down to eat, that it had been a long day for her, two days, almost, and one of them had been spent between his self-made prison and John's car boot.

She rolls her eyes in reply. "You're a bit of a dad, aren't you?" she asks, ripping into the toast with her teeth. “Tea and toast and slippers. I bet you’ve got more books than clothes.”

“Can you see that many books in here?” Mark asks, settling into his chair. Other than the bookshelf, the room is a mess of half-owned things: dying plants he inherited from the previous occupant, a stack of records, a turntable. Across the walls are clippings, pictures of faces he has never seen. His one chair; a table with three legs and a plank; his bookcase, a toaster, a kettle. His desk. His wine-rack. Not a pair of slippers in sight.

Reclining in his chair, he takes a sip of his tea, crossing his legs at the ankle. “Jenny, why didn’t you go to John?”

She looks away, stuffing more toast into her mouth. He doesn’t see her chew so much as rapidly push the food into a swallow. “He left me with Mum,” she answers at last. “Just waltzed off into the night, like bloody Batman. Didn’t give two fucks about me.”

“That’s not true—”

“So where is he then? Eh?” Her anger is explosive, and petty. “I don’t know where he lives, I don’t know where he works, I just know he’s some no-name plod who— who—”

“Who put himself out for you today.”

“And then left me!” she yells, furious. The plate slides off her lap, crumbs tumbling into chair as she leans forward to spit at him. “He just dumped me back at hers, all whatever and the like. Like he’s washed his hands of me.” She sniffs, falling back into the chair, crossing her arms like a mullish child. In the sudden quiet she looks very young, and tired.

Mark remembers that anger in Zoe - how quick her temper could light when it came to John, and how quickly it would burn out. Zoe, who fret at the sleeves of her cardigan, and drank full-fat milk with her coffee, but semi-skimmed with her tea. Zoe, who spent so much of her time trying to condemn John, and defend him in the same breath. Jenny is the same. Sudden fits of frustration, and then laconic, trying too hard to be apathetic. As though nothing can touch her. If only she knew.

Leaning forward to set his tea on the floor, Mark sighs. He is tired. Some mornings he wakes up and doesn’t remember where he is. Some mornings he wakes up, and remembers only too well. He’s too old for this now, he thinks. Too old to babysit a halfling. “John will have had his reasons, Jenny, even if he didn’t disclose them to you.” He pauses, wondering whether to go on, before adding, “It’s been a long year.”

“Shut up.”

He sighs, reaches for the tea again, but doesn’t drink it. “Not everything is as it seems,” he says, thinking of Alice, locked up for the one thing she didn’t do; thinking of himself, probably free for the one thing that he did. “Not everything is that simple.”

 

 

 

 

At some point he falls asleep. When he wakes it’s past one in the morning, and Jenny is sitting by one of the lamps, legs tucked beneath her, reading a magazine she must have scooped off the floor. His tea and the plate are stacked by the sink, and her hair is down. His neck aches from sleeping in the chair. He groans softly as he stretches out his legs. Jenny looks up.

“Come on, you can sleep in the bed,” he says, getting slowly to his feet.

“What, your bed?” she asks with a wry curl of her lip.

“Don’t worry. I won’t be in it.” He shuffles towards the door, feeling every year of his age. “Come on, you can’t sleep here.”

Jenny uncurls herself from the rug. She stands without grace, kneeling up on one knee, and launching herself forward. “Where you going to sleep?”

“I’ll think of something.”

She stops. “Don’t be stupid. I’m not tired.” She huffs. “I won’t actually steal from you, you know. I’ve got _some_ manners.”

“I dread to think what you consider manners,” says Mark, but he’s charmed all the same. “Look, just. I’ll pull out a duvet, and you can sit on that instead, okay?”

Together they make a make-shift bed from the two armchairs in the atrium. Mark throws a sheet over them, then folds the duvet twice like a book, so Jenny can slide between two doubled layers. It’s a king-sized throw, a left-over from the house that he hasn’t seen in months. John had brought it, along with his clothes in a worn duffel, and the books he had amassed on his bed-side table. There had been some photographs in the duffel, too, but Mark doesn’t take those out. It grates him to think that John had handled them, and then he berates himself, over and over, in a circle. He hates John for bringing him here, for making this his life. And then he thinks of Alice, and is grateful, if only for a while.

Jenny’s shoes are already by the door. She clambers onto the chairs fully-clothed, and looks up at Mark in the doorway.

“We’re a right pair, aren’t we?”

Mark frowns. “How do you mean?”

“We’ve got all these places inside us, cut up like glass because of John.” She smiles, her face grim. “And here we are, waiting for him to come back and fix us. Totally loco.”

Mark wants to protest, to say again that that’s not how it is. But he looks at Jenny, small, and bruised, sitting on his two good chairs, hoping to find some rest, and he thinks about this space he now inhabits, half-house, half-prison, and he wonders if she isn’t right. John has left him behind, too, to fend for himself.

“Go to sleep, Jenny,” he says, reaching to close the door. “Don’t give yourself nightmares.”

> Marooned, then,  
>  but well fed on the substance of this world.  
>  And still forsaken. And still hungry.  
>  **—campbell mcrgrath, from _consciousness_**  
> 

**end.**


End file.
